Oh, I may be on the side of the angels, but don't think for one second that I am one of them. – Sherlock

Posts Tagged ‘idiots’

Another hurricane for New Orleans. Seriously, if this one hits and lays waste to NO, I don’t want a single dime spent on rebuilding it or helping people out who live there. Enough is enough.

It is sad, yes. But the rest of us should not be on the hook for their poor judgment.

Update:

Looky…

Past performance being an indicator of future possibility (not deterministic, however), this does not look good. We’ll see how much energy that sucker picks up in the next 24 hours.

****

All the talking heads are saying either “we’re all gonna die” or “the economy is on the mend – the rate of jobless claims isn’t skyrocketing quite as fast. Garbage doesn’t appear to lie so I’ll just trust in that. GDP lags because it takes a while to collect and compile the data, but I’d say there’s a high degree of correlation.

The opener… a teacher found to have been a pr0nstar. Not unheard of. I mean, who hasn’t starred in one or two? †

In a letter sent yesterday to Haydock parents, school brass noted that they are “asking teachers to discourage the children from searchingfor and/or visiting these inappropriate sites. We ask that you be particularly vigilant over the next few days with respect to the Internet content being accessed by your child on his or her telephone or other Internet-ready device.” – The Smoking Gun, reporting on a teacher placed on leave after someone “accidentally stumbled across” her porn movies (link here: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/buster/teacher-stars-in-porn-768912

Asking teachers to discourage their children from searching for and/or visiting these inappropriate sites…

blink… blink… nods earnestly… blink… blink…

Really? This is like pouring sugar on the ground at a picnic to keep away ants.

The “school brass” should be let go because obviously they couldn’t successfully fold socks or figure out which end of the toothbrush is the end that goes in the mouth, they are just that stupid.

A California middle school teacher has been placed on leave after administrators learned from students that the educator appears in porn videos available online.

Learned from students? Really? Oh, I imagine someone in that school district new full well what “experiments” Ms. Halas was up to before the kids ever did.

I love how one superintendent used the words “moral turpitude” and “penal code” all in the same sentence. If anybody needs me I’ll be going to look up “turpitude”.

What kids haven’t already seen it will now be flocking to it and it is a hopeless lost cause. Know when to just remain silent. This is like trying to do damage control as the Titanic is going down. Heh… “going down”… heh.

I will say, the teacher has some large… uh… “floatation devices”. And a quick web-search… yeah, give it up, you guys.

† Besides me, that is.

****

Now, before we get all schadenfreuded out over the demise of Carbonite after Rush Limbaugh’s inelegant depiction of Sandra Flake, the Whore-o-Babylon activist who joined college in order to have a nifty sandbox to crap in, let’s take a step back and look at their stock performance over a period of one year, shall we?

Now, I’m no rock-it scientist but that there looks like a pretty decent downward trend, and yeah, there was a dip that was pretty tell-tale right after their fit of pique once they heard El Rushbo trash-talking Flake… but they look like they have been growing rancid and stale for quite a while now.

Italian fashion house Emilio Cavallini has found that European men are ready and eager to don pantyhose. Will American dudes follow suit?

Seriously. Mantyhose. Over the years I have come to find that I have a surprising number of gay friends and generally don’t think of things in these terms anymore, but here is all I can really say about that…

How gay do you want to be, guys?

Crap, that’s about two steps away from cruisin’ in black leather chaps and yay far from a dress.

****

It was late in yesterday’s posting so if you missed it then… The Butcher of Lansing found a great clothing tag.

The news article kind of focused on the wrong thing here. A man was gored in Madrid. That’s nice. He was gored by a bull whose horns were intentionally loaded with wax and set on fire. I am NOT a PETA freak. I eat animals every single day and will never stop. Even though I haven’t been in years I consider myself a hunter. But focusing on the runner instead of the idiots who purposely gave a poor animal pure terror? Come on, that’s criminal.

Torres said the bull charged the man, gored him and then stamped on his head, causing him “irreversible injuries.” He said he had offered his condolences to the man’s family, but would not cancel similar events scheduled for early Sunday.

“Although ours is a small town, many people from outside come to visit our feast dedicated to Saint Anton,” Torres said, adding that black bows had been tied to town hall flags as a mark of respect and mourning.

“Unfortunately, the mother has elected not to cooperate with the police any further in this investigation,” Wilkie said. “The tragedy of this is that the child’s tattoos are some sort of memorial to a sibling who was lost in a car accident a few years ago. I understand from the investigators that there are several memorial to the deceased child in the apartment where they live. It may be that professional or religious counseling for their/her grief would be more helpful than anything.”

Why should the mother co-operate with officials who arrested her for something like this? I don’t normally feel this way about police but bitez mon crank. Since when do citizens need their police officers to suggest what we need for our grief process.

That someone had to even waste the breath to say this scares me so much that I get anxiety attacks.

Hell, Republicans are doing everything possible to help Obama win.

The fact that no one has beaten the everloving stuffing out of Donald Trump is great support for my argument.

Why the RNC isn’t vetting candidates as hard or harder than the Democrats stymies me. Look at all the effort wasted on people like Cain. Cain looked all right, but it wasn’t until accusations piled up hip deep that it was obvious that the man was so devoid of common sense that he’d even try to run with skeletons and even still-warm bodies in his closet.

All of the wasted effort and slashing of the frontrunners by the laggers – here’s what’s happening:

In 2012, there is going to be an election which is very similar to the world heavyweight boxing title.

In preparation for it, all the Republican hopefuls are going to engage in razor fighting and everyone assumes that if they are going down their situation can be saved with a kamikaze razor.

People like Trump who duck in the melee now and then to shoot front-runners in the ass with stuff ranging from sedatives to paralytics to gasoline is the new millennium’s answer to Ross Perot.

Sniping the leader rather than weeding out the weak DOES NOT MAKE FOR WINNING AN ELECTION. Natural selection results in stronger individuals when you let the carnivores eat the weak. If you kill off the strongest so only the weakest can take each other down then when it comes to the primary a choice between weaker candidates is all that is left.

Dick Morris is no dummy. If he’s expending the breath to say Ron Paul would be a win for Obama worries me. The implication is that that Mittens or Newt, neither of which are good solid electable Presidential material, could slash each other to the point where they bleed to death, or some idiot could attack the better of the two so they can attack the weaker…

Don’t get me wrong – I think every last Republican in the field is better than Obama… every… single… one… but I also think that we’re treading into the waters of unelectability with Mittens and Gingrich, and Ron Paul… if we get Paul, hell, let’s just not even bother with the election, okay?

****

Found over on Weasel Zippers. It makes me ashamed that I was born and raised in Orygun, even though I am one of perhaps six folks to come from there that are conservative.

The real dirty little secret of the American economy is that we are doing OK.

Sure, if you’re a bigger company and can get a loan, or if you’re not locked in one place because your house is so far underwater that you’ve got fish spawning in your attic insulation, or if you felt comfortable splurging now and then (even though you’re far from it), or if you felt like there’s nothing really that says something can’t come right along and wipe out a huge number of businesses w/o working up much of a sweat.

We are NOT doing OK. We are pursuing the practice of spending beyond our means with a very shaky economy with high unemployment. That is not ok, it has never been ok, and will never BE ok by any definition written by someone who isn’t smoking crack cocaine.

In its final statement before the end of the year, the Federal Reserve described the economy as “expanding moderately.” Almost all major statistics suggest that “moderately” may be an understatement. Manufacturing surveys such as those conducted by the Institute for Supply Management have been above 50 for months, which indicates growth. The same goes for service-sector surveys.

The overall economy as defined by GDP figures has been in the range of 2 percent, not great, but also not artificially inflated by too-easy credit, as was the case between 2004 and 2007. Incomes are flat or slightly down, but savings are up, which shows that the vast majority are living within their means and making solid choice about the lives.

Unemployment remains high, and structural, but also stagnant. Job gains are minimal, but so are job losses. And consumer sentiment, a fickle barometer, but indicative of moods and expectations, has been slowly creeping up against a tide of negative views about the U.S. and the world emanating from politics, Wall Street and the media.

But here’s the question – if all the statistics say that the economy is doing great, and every person out there has this awful gut feeling that things are anything but… please tell me how the economy is doing great.

The statement “consumer sentiment, a fickle barometer” is one of the most arrogant things to say. Consumer sentiment is just fine, it is the idiots reading the tea leaves that contribute to the notion of ‘fickle barometer’.

Negative views about the US and the world emanating from politics, Wall Street, and the media ARE CORRECT. Things are really quite dire. So either the author is quibbling and saying nothing at all – OR – he is trying to say in a couched fashion that things are lookin’ good and it’ll be a sunny day tomorrow. One is a waste of everyone’s time and the other is an “expert” who needs to start infusing analyses with reality.

How about “No, I would not care for a drink” and if that doesn’t work say “Why the f*ck do you care if I have a drink or not? I don’t want one, and leave me alone about it.” Is either one of those just too difficult to say?

They suggest that some of those below are acceptable, which if the people are so casual of acquaintances that you can use these (or if you care so little you can say you get really racist after a few drinks) why do you care what they think when you tell them “No” and fall back on “Piss off”?

“No thanks. I get really racist after a few drinks.”

“Before I accept, I should warn you I brought a guitar with me.”

“I love drinking, but it doesn’t half make me vomit.”

“Not for me, I have a flight to catch later on. No, I’m a pilot.”

“I know I don’t look it, but I’m only 15. It’s a long and deeply disturbing story.”

How about this instead?

“Only two of the violent assault convictions were ever provably due to alcohol and I’ve paid my debt to society, so… sure, why not?”

I read something like this and I think “Gosh I’m proud to be a fellow American to this guy” and “Gosh I’m not worthy of his sacrifice(s)”.

Already wounded by a bullet that went through both his legs, (Sgt. 1st Class Leroy Arthur) Petry picked up an enemy grenade that landed near him and two fellow Rangers and threw it back toward the enemy, according to the Army News Service. The grenade detonated and blew off Petry’s right hand. Petry applied a tourniquet to his wound and called for help.

And you’d be completely within your rights if you thought to yourself “… and then he probably went over and kicked the bad guys’ asses before deciding whether to pass out.”

That’s one tough hombre.

****

REALLY steams my clams when you hear about the total opposite end of the spectrum, with losers like this.

“I do not believe my post put anybody in physical danger,” Cook said in an email response to several questions posed by FoxNews.com. “I do not believe that people whose photographs are distributed by the White House as part of its public relations efforts have a reasonable claim to ask that no one speculate as to who they are.”

[snip]

Cook said he and his Gawker editors discussed potential safety concerns before publishing the information and photos.

“We came to the conclusion that it is highly unlikely that the White House would distribute for publication a photograph of a man whose life would be endangered if his photograph were ever published. Likewise, we decided that it is highly unlikely that such a man would publicly accompany the director of Central Intelligence, in the presence of AP photographers, to Capitol Hill to testify.”

So how is it that reporters and other liberal arts majors acting as editors are somehow more qualified to assess danger to an agent’s person (or surrounding networks) than the intelligence people themselves?

This guy is so clueless as to his uselessness that if he really understood the sheer magnitude of how abysmally worthless he is as a human being, he’d immediately commit suicide. Most people, when they really are truly forced to face the truth – deep in their soul – have the capacity to be ashamed and find the truth to be intolerable.

NBC has issued a formal apology to more than 100 members of Congress for omitting the words “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance during a patriotic montage that aired last month.

The letter, signed by Kyle McSlarrow, president of NBC Universal, comes in response to a complaint by 107 members of Congress alleging that a montage shown during coverage of the U.S. Open golf tournament obscured America’s religious heritage.

The montage featured video of schoolchildren saying the pledge alongside images of soldiers and American flags, but did not include the phrase “under God.” It also omitted “one nation” and “indivisible.”

NBC ought to be issuing the apology to the rest of us Americans who are deeply insulted by their atheist left-wing editing of reality.

There’s an awful lot of leftists (and minorities, if you get right down to it) who are perpetuating problems that should be behind us by seeking to divide us in the name of “freedom”. When was the last time you saw a liberal that celebrated freedom for it’s own sake and not as a tool to control others in their pursuit of societal and economic engineering?

Also, speaking to point out that part of freedom is the freedom from (a) integrating and, (b) standing as one, is a time-honored leftists (and dare I say anti-American?) tactic. It’s much like saying “In a free country we have the right to burn the flag”. Actually, yes you probably do technically have that right, but it isn’t right, proper, or worthy – and no one should celebrate or tolerate your actions.

Popular Science sometimes means not having to say you really thought it through.

Ok, so that was a bit harsh. I like Pop. Sci.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong: Blotting Out the Sun

Filling the stratosphere with sulfur aerosols could cool the globe, but it could also cause widespread drought and destruction – Jamie Sneddon

Well, I’ll tell you what could go wrong. According to the logic of Al Gore, by cooling the Earth we could make it warmer. Why the hell not? By warming it we’re making it colder, he has as much as said so.

But in my heart of hearts, I agree with Sneddon, that actively seeking to change the albedo of the Earth isn’t something one f***s around with lightly.

While it’s melting glaciers and creating more intense hurricanes, global warming also seems to be heating up forest fires in the United States. In western states over the past few decades, more wildfires have blazed across the countryside, burning more area for longer periods of time. Scientists have correlated the rampant blazes with warmer temperatures and earlier snowmelt. When spring arrives early and triggers an earlier snow-melt, forest areas become drier and stay so for longer, increasing the chance that they might ignite.

It misses the most glaringly evident root cause of what is making wildfires worse, burning more areas for longer has been correlated with not letting regular fires clear out the undergrowth, so when there IS a fire it’s hot enough that the largest trees don’t survive – they die. You can’t hardly wade through the stuff. And when it dries it dries completely and it burns extremely hot.

There’s absolutely no doubt that hot weather increases the risk of fire – that’s a no-brainer – but to try to pin fire duration on “global warming” without mention of the other man-made problem, which is caused by the fact that we can’t leave well enough alone, is misleading at best and deceptive at worst.

Update: I’m out today. Just not feeling great and tired of going to work no matter what. It gets old showing up day after day to do your job when all you want to do is lie down.

I know that didn’t sound too cheery. This ought to help – Got the link on a tip from Monster (cbullitt) over at Aardvark’s and Asshats. Published in The Canadian. All through the article the author/compiler peppered the thing with “could”, “could be”, “probably”, “as much as”, and my favorite “if validated”. Emphasis mine…

Over 4.5 Billion people could die from Global Warming-related causes by 2012

To summarize, human activity is causing the Earth to warm. Bacteria converts carbon in the soil into greenhouse gasses, and enormous quantities are trapped in unstable clathrates. As the earth continues to warm, permafrost clathrates will thaw; peat and soil microbial activity will dramatically increase; and, finally, vast oceanic clathrates will melt. This global warming chain reaction has happened in the past.

Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 rose by a record amount over the past year. It is the third successive year in which they have increased sharply.Scientists are at a loss to explain why the rapid rise has taken place, but fear the trendcould be the first sign of runaway global warming.

…

Runaway Global Warming promises to literally burn-up agricultural areas into dust worldwide by 2012, causing global famine, anarchy, diseases, and war on a global scale as military powers including the U.S., Russia, and China, fight for control of the Earth’s remaining resources.

Over 4.5 billion people could die from Global Warming related causes by 2012, as planet Earth accelarates into a greed-driven horrific catastrophe.

Maybe the Mayan 2012 thing had merit? Ohgoshwe’reallgonnadie!

The “hydrate hypothesis” (if validated) spells the rapid onset of runaway catastrophic global warming. In fact, you should remember this moment when you learned about this feedback loop-it is an existencial turning point in your life.

By the way, the “hydrate hypothesis” is a weeks old scientific theory, and is only now being discussed by global warming scientists. I suggest you Google the term.

Now that most scientists agree human activity is causing the Earth to warm, the central debate has shifted to when we will pass the tipping point and be helpless to stop the runaway Global Warming.

The author paints a picture where all scientists are working day and night as a cohesive organism, grim faced, with scurrying engineers and acolytes – all tirelessly sacrificing to understand the process by which a large portion of humanity will die – all because of greed.

Let’s not analyze her or her remarks too closely but focus instead on a generalization that we can make based on the statement as presented.

Education is very useful, valuable even, but if you are a blithering idiot it’s a waste of your time and dangerous to others.

On NPR’s Environment report this morning I heard a piece about toxic chemicals in things we use every day – cleaning supplies, household goods, and even perfumes. The idiocy was here:

Ann Steinemann is an environmental engineering professor at the University of Washington, and has studied hundreds of cleaning products. She says nearly all brands on the market, even those labeled green products, contain undisclosed carcinogens – which are considered hazardous by the Environmental Protection Agency:

“According to the EPA, things that are classified as carcinogens have no safe exposure level. There is no safe exposure level. Even one molecule cannot be considered safe.”

Some of the most toxic shit known to mankind, ricin and botulinum toxin – will not kill you with one molecule… NOTHING will.

Nor can it be considered unsafe at any level. This is such a bogus statement. Sure it’s technically true but it has no intrinsic value. It’s like saying human’s diet includes bugs because we get them in chocolate. Well, yeah, we do get bugs in our chocolate, but so freakin’ what?

The EPA is not the final arbiter of information about what is good and what is bad – they hold no universal truths and they can be wrong. The problem is that when you start labeling things as toxic or carcinogenic those claims are based on testing that is the biological equivalent of testing to failure in the mechanical engineering fields. There is no number where you say “Oh, after 10,032 molecules you’ll die of gangrene of the eardrum”.

Why scare people with statements that lead them to believe that even one teensy little bit that can only (maybe) seen wtih a gas chromatograph is going to kill them? What if it is a thousand times some teensy amount? Is that bad enough? It’s not at all clear that even then it’s ok to declare a product “unsafe”. Just claiming that the presense of a substance is enough to ban it is asinine.

Yes, lots of things are carcinogenic. Yes, some things are scary. That doesn’t mean we should freak everybody out with technically correct claims that are still so far removed from reason as to immediately lower the IQ of anyone who hears them.

Disclaimer: I am not even remotely interested in debating chemicals in consumer goods, not even a teensy bit. I’m ranting about scary-sounding statements used to make one’s cause seem more urgent, like the one above.

****

It is time to come out, come clean… I… I… I am a fountain pen freak. My father is disgusted – he says “We embraced ball-point pens for a reason!” Yeah, well, my hand gets tired with BP and fine-point pens – and a good fountain pen is smooth as glass. And no one steals them, either, because 97.23% of the people out there can’t write with ’em. Good, I say.

My Personal “Things” – Don’t Peek

FAIR USE NOTICE:
This website (blog) may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not been pre-authorized by the copyright owner. Such material is made available to advance understanding of political, economic, scientific, social, art, media, religious and cultural issues. The 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material that may exist on this site is provided for under U.S. Copyright Law. In accordance with U.S. Code Title 17, Section 107, material on this site is distributed without profit to persons interested in such information for research and educational purposes. Please Note: If you want to use any copyrighted material that may exist on this site for purposes that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.